The Abbe
Sieyes pronounced politics a science which he had finished, and
he was ready to turn you out constitutions to order, with no
other defect than that they had, as Carlyle wittily says, no feet,
and could not go. Many in the last century, and some, perhaps,
in the present, for folly as well as wisdom has her heirs,
confounded the written instrument with the constitution itself.
No constitution can be written on paper or engrossed on parchment.
What the convention may agree upon, draw up, and the people
ratify by their votes, is no constitution, for it is extrinsic to
the nation, not inherent and living in it--is, at best,
legislative instead of constitutive. The famous Magna Charta
drawn up by Cardinal Langton, and wrung from John Lackland by the
English barons at Runnymede, was no constitution of England till
long after the date of its concession, and even then was no
constitution of the state, but a set of restrictions on power.
The constitution is the intrinsic or inherent and actual
constitution of the people or political community itself; that
which makes the nation what it is, and distinguishes it from
every other nation, and varies as nations themselves vary from
one another.
The constitution of the state is not a theory, nor is it drawn up
and established in accordance with any preconceived theory. What
is theoretic in a constitution is unreal.
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